Digg releases new web widgets

New tools for news and Digg views make it easy to spread them online.

Digg.com has released a new suite of tools called Digg Widgets. This toolset is designed to make it easier to embed content from Digg on to other websites.

The widgets enable users to add Digg content to their own sites without having to do extra work, wrote Daniel Burka, the company's creative director, on Digg's blog.

Users can customize many aspects of the widgets, including background colour, borders, titles and link colours. The widgets also allow users to display Digg counts next to each story, Burka added.

In addition to newly popular stories, the widgets will include top ten lists and will filter content from a specific domain. When news is updated on Digg, it will automatically be displayed on a user's website.

"If you're a content publisher, you can now easily display a widget filtered just for content from your site," Burka wrote.

While the widgets replace the old method of including a list of Digg stories on a site, the old way will continue to work, Burka added.

Digg also announced several updates to its Arc visualization technology, which allows Digg stories and topics to be displayed wrapped around a sphere. Stories with more Diggs have thicker arcs than those with fewer Diggs. The new features of Arc include speed control and improved interaction, making it easier to go from outside the arc to the center, Burka wrote. Digg has also made it easier to see who has Digged stories in the Arc.